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Mesa Makes More Strides Towards OpenGL 3.x Support

07-15-2010, 11:30 AM

Phoronix: Mesa Makes More Strides Towards OpenGL 3.x Support

The OpenGL 3.0 specification was announced in August of 2007 and has already been succeeded by OpenGL 3.1, OpenGL 3.2, and then earlier this year came OpenGL 3.3 and OpenGL 4.0. While the 3.0 revision to this industry standard graphics API has been around for nearly three years, it's still not fully supported by the open-source Mesa graphics stack. Progress though is being made...

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VMware seems to invest a lot in it, and I suppose they want to use it for some kind of virtualization. But AFAIK they mostly contribute to the core and the software drivers. It seems a bit of a gamble to me to rely on others to produce the hardware drivers. Or perhaps they are planning to run their virtualization on softpipe or proprietary drivers. I'm a bit in the dark what their plans exactly are.

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Thank you, NVIDIA, for providing us with decent drivers with full OpenGL 3.3 support (I'm not sure about 4.0 - I've never owned GTX 4xx cards).

And I bet you've never ran anything that used those 3.3 extensions (except for perhaps Unigine).

I'll start worrying about 3.x and 4.0 support when I start trying to run cutting edge games on Linux that don't have a 2.x fallback. At the moment there is no rush to implement these APIs because no-one is using them anyway. These cutting edge games don't yet exist, and even if they did it would be financial suicide to not code in a fallback.

Remember DX10? It was only supported on Vista but everyone still used XP, so the games companies continued to use DX9 OR fallback to DX9 if DX10 wasn't present. I'm pretty sure that most games still fallback to DX9. It's the same for GL, if a large percentage of users are still running GL 2.x drivers, then anyone developing OpenGL will code in a fallback if GL 3.x isn't available.

Of course, it would be great to boast this support in MESA, and of course some of the new features can provide performance boosts, or better rendering quality, but the open drivers currently have other performance issues that negate any improvements they would bring. 3.x and 4.0 support would be nice to have, but it's far from urgent.

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And I bet you've never ran anything that used those 3.3 extensions (except for perhaps Unigine).

I'll start worrying about 3.x and 4.0 support when I start trying to run cutting edge games on Linux that don't have a 2.x fallback. At the moment there is no rush to implement these APIs because no-one is using them anyway. These cutting edge games don't yet exist, and even if they did it would be financial suicide to not code in a fallback.

Remember DX10? It was only supported on Vista but everyone still used XP, so the games companies continued to use DX9 OR fallback to DX9 if DX10 wasn't present. I'm pretty sure that most games still fallback to DX9. It's the same for GL, if a large percentage of users are still running GL 2.x drivers, then anyone developing OpenGL will code in a fallback if GL 3.x isn't available.

Of course, it would be great to boast this support in MESA, and of course some of the new features can provide performance boosts, or better rendering quality, but the open drivers currently have other performance issues that negate any improvements they would bring. 3.x and 4.0 support would be nice to have, but it's far from urgent.

I never thought about it like that until you made your post.

I am still happy to hear of this development because I am not sure if id Tech 5 will be using OpenGL3 or not.